Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story by Gary Indiana; Cliff
Street Books; 254 pages; $25.00.
In 1997, America was shocked and riveted by the saga of Andrew Cunanan,
the young Filipino-Italian-American who became infamous by killing the openly gay
fashion designer and photographer Gianni Versace.

Though Versace was the fifth man Cunanan killed, he was his
first celebrity; and "only celebrities have real lives". "The killer,
widely ignored while he left a trail of bodies from Minnesota to New Jersey,
became, abruptly, a diabolic icon in the circus of American celebrity".

But Cunanan was more than a killer. He was a "homicidal
homosexual"; the focus of American fears and misconceptions about gay men
and gay lifestyles.

"Egregiously, with little or no regard for accuracy,
Cunanan's life was transformed from the somewhat poignant and depressing but
fairly ordinary thing it was into a narrative overripe with tabloid evil:
ugly sex, drug dealing, prostitution, et cetera", wrote Gary Indiana in
Three Month Fever, his impressionistic account of Cunanan and his victims.

"TV was fashioning a homosexual golem to absorb every scary fantasy about
the gay community". An all-too typical account of Cunanan's "trail of
death" is the book Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace and the
Largest Failed Manhunt in U.S. History by Vanity Fair reporter Maureen Orth.

Though Orth's book is more factual than Indiana's, it suffers from the fact
that Orth, like most straights, doesn't have a clue about what gay men do.

Indiana, an openly gay man and a respected novelist, doesn't share
Orth's prejudices. If anything, Indiana seems to be too sympathetic toward
Cunanan, who but for the grace of God could have been your brother, your
lover, or even you.

Though Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story is
billed as "Indiana's first full-length work of nonfiction", it has more in
common with Indiana's novel Resentment (about the Menendez boys) than with
Orth's journalistic account.

Like Truman Capote before him, Indiana
combines fact and fiction in his narrative, creating a "hybrid of narration
and reflection". This comes in handy when Indiana tries to figure out what
went on inside Cunanan's feverish brain, or describe dialogues or situations
between Cunanan and his victims where all the participants are, of course,
dead.

Indiana goes so far as to "rewrite" entries from a journal that
Cunanan allegedly wrote about his trip to the Philippines, to visit his
estranged father. No serious reporter could get away with this, but Indiana
manages to make it work.

The Cunanan who emerges in Three Month Fever is not a "serial
killer" or a "spree killer", labels given to him by a hysterical media. On
the contrary, "the so-called spree itself hadn't been that much fun, more of
a compulsion really and furthermore one that surprised him as much as
anybody else."

If anything, Cunanan was depressingly ordinary; a bright,
handsome boy who, like many of us, tried to live beyond his means. He was
into SM but no more so than many law-abiding gays; a kept boy for a while
but not a "high-class male prostitute"; and though he sold prescription
drugs to make ends meet, he wasn't the high-level drug dealer that Orth and
her ilk imagined him to be.

Ashamed of his modest origins, he invented a
fantasy life for himself, as the wealthy Jew "Andrew DeSilva", a fiction
that enthralled but eventually repelled his friends and loved ones.

Above all, Cunanan wanted to be loved; to the extent that what others thought of
him "was more important to him than life itself." Cunanan thought he found
love, first with Jeffrey Trail and then with David Madson; and when these
two men decided that they had enough of him, Cunanan killed them.

All this does not justify murder, of course. But it makes more
sense of the situation than the specter of a sadomasochistic, drug-dealing,
cross-dressing, HIV+ prostitute on a rampage that the het media would have
us believe.

By the time Cunanan had killed Trail, Madson, real estate
developer Lee Miglin (another old trick), and cemetery caretaker William
Reese, he was already out of his mind (Indiana has him hearing voices).

After Cunanan killed Versace, in cold blood and for no apparent reason, he
was at a dead end on South Beach, and it was only a matter of time before
Cunanan would have to face the consequences of his acts. Having to choose
between suicide and twenty minutes on Florida's electric chair, Cunanan
wisely chose to kill himself.

Gianni Versace

Speaking of Versace, Three Month Fever does its best to knock "Saint
Gianni" off from the pedestal that the media put him in after his murder.

Indiana notes with relish Versace's drug and sex habits, and quotes from a
police interview of a hustler who was procured to take part in one of the
designer's legendary orgies.

Indiana places Cunanan's murder of Versace
within the dubious tradition, begun with the Kennedy assassination, of the
"world's most important person slain by [the] world's least important
person", and part of a twenty-four hour media circus that thrives upon blood
and violence.

"The Andrew narrative, in effect, solved the JonBenet Ramsey
murder case, as that case had finally wrapped up the O.J. Simpson case,
which in turn had closed the Menendez case, the Andrew mystery would
ultimately be solved by the death of Princess Di, which in turn would
achieve 'closure' in the form of Monica Lewinsky." The deaths of John F.
Kennedy, Jr. and his wife is only the latest of a long line of media-fueled
"events".

We will never know what made Cunanan tick, or kill. His story is
only too familiar in a world where teenagers open fire in a classroom
because they were made fun of; or a man kills a dozen people (including his
family) because he lost money in the stock market.

Three Month Fever, though speculative at best, comes as close as any book
can to understanding the enigma that was Andrew Cunanan.
Gary Indiana combines the talents of a novelist, the skills of a journalist,
and the empathy of a fellow queer to shed some light on this sad scenario.
All that the reader can do is go along for the ride, and enjoy every
disturbing minute of it.